Finding a place to park in some Long Beach neighborhoods has been a challenge for years, if not decades, but City Hall says things will soon be different.

The proposed budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 calls for a $950,000 outlay to be spent on what Mayor Robert Garcia has said will be the city’s biggest parking reform in some 30 years. Plans include changing street-sweeping times and eliminating parking restrictions that in some places make it illegal to have a car parked curbside as early as 4 a.m.

“Being forced to move at 4 in the morning is not reasonable, and not something I want anybody to do,” Garcia said in an interview.

“This is the No. 1 thing that I hear about. ‘Can you please get us some parking relief?’ ”

The projected $950,000 price tag is a function of the cost of replacing each of the many street signs that warn motorists when they cannot park on a given block. Each sign costs an estimated $8 to produce and install, and there are roughly 118,000 such signs posted around Long Beach.

“People don’t realize we have to change our parking signs across the entire city,” Public Works Director Ara Maloyan said during a recent City Council budget hearing.

He also said the Public Works Department department will take advice from all nine City Council offices before rerouting the city’s street-sweeping operations and that it may be possible to complete the plan by the end of 2015.

Updating the city’s street-sweeping schedule is also being pursued with the objective of shrinking parking restriction windows from four hours to two hours and eliminating conflicts between street-sweeping operations and trash pickups.

Streets with vexing early morning parking restrictions can be found in such areas as Willmore City, Alamitos Beach, and Craftsman Village, the mayor said. Finding a parking space on a night before early morning “no parking” rules go into effect can be a race against one’s neighbors to find an available space.

Those who cannot find an open space often choose between driving around in circles, driving to another neighborhood or parking in a forbidden zone and waking up before sunrise in order to avoid a $50 parking ticket.

“All said, it’s inhumane,” said 2nd District Councilwoman Suja Lowenthal, who went on to say it’s not right for street-sweeping schedules to interrupt residents’ rest time.

Lowenthal’s district ranges from the Port of Long Beach area through downtown and as far east as the Bluff Park neighborhood. She said the entire district is considered to be, in the language of local government, “parking impacted” and that constituents have asked for help in improving parking policies since her 2006 election.

Long Beach’s budget document shows city managers expect to collect more than $13.1 million from parking citations during the current fiscal year. Although the planned reforms may prevent some people from being hit with tickets, City Hall is actually projecting a slight increase in parking citation revenue. City officials expect to obtain nearly $13.7 million in parking ticket revenue during the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.

City spokeswoman Kerry Gerot stated in an email that although she did not have immediate access to information explaining exactly why ticket collections are expected to increase, City Hall has taken steps to improve its collections practices after an audit revealed the city had failed to collect millions in unpaid parking fines.

A 2012 audit concluded that Long Beach’s use of outdated software resulted in nearly $18 million worth of parking fines going uncollected.

Parking tickets are the sixth most-significant source of revenue for Long Beach’s general fund, which pays for essential city services such as police, firefighting, parks and libraries. Property taxes, expected to bring in nearly $104 million over the coming fiscal year, are the most important source of money for the general fund.

Andrew Edwards covers business and higher education for the Long Beach Press-Telegram. He has previously covered City Hall in Long Beach. He has spent his entire career in Southern California, having worked at publications including the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, The Sun and Daily Pilot before coming to Long Beach. He graduated from UCLA in 2003 after studying political science and history.

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